The Imposition of BoJack Horseman

When you don’t need to make your jerk protagonist even worse.

BoJack Horseman is one of those strange animated Netflix shows. It got to run for six seasons, starting in 2014, so the creators got to tell most of the intended story. The portrayals of mental illness and character development not being linear but existing in peaks and valleys, along with the criticisms of Hollywood and the patriarchy, make its humor sharp and biting and its sadness devastating. Looking back after ten years brings a fair amount of hindsight to the forefront.

Listening to some of the behind-the-scenes is fascinating for a different reason; creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg has mentioned in interviews that the show was a constant experiment in how far the writers could push BoJack’s morality, and the correlation with an audience response. Sometimes that experiment paid off, with viewers responding viscerally to the misadventures of a washed-up horse celebrity in a world with anthropomorphic characters. And other times? You could tell when it fell flat.

As a disclaimer, this is my nitpicking season five, which is still a solid season for BoJack Horseman. I’m more discussing other ways that BoJack could have fallen, that were set up in the premiere and early episodes. We will be discussing SPOILERS, so be warned.